(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for automating a business process in various business environments and workflows, including a system and utility device that can help design and implement a business decision making procedure and automate workflow.
(b) Description of the Related Art
In a typical business environment, each business has its own business procedures that vary a lot depending on the nature and type of business where it belongs. Furthermore, the business procedures in the same business change and evolve periodically as new systems and technologies are introduced outside and inside of the business. Therefore, it is not easy to automate the business procedures because it is not easy to categorize the business procedures and make them abstract. Even though a system that can automate certain business procedures is developed, such a system may become obsolete as soon as it is developed, because of rapidly changing business demands and environments. Especially, a system that can be generally adapted for almost every business environment has been far from being developed.
As general computing power of the computer used for business purpose grows exponentially and such business software as word-processor, spreadsheet, scheduler and e-mail programs are widespread, participants in the general business procedures become more computer-oriented. Although wide-spread use of computers in the business field relieved a lot of people from repetitive simple tasks, however, the introduction of the computer in the job made the entire business procedures more complicated and introduced more dependency on the machines. Furthermore, such dependency on the machines increased the number of people involved in the business procedure and made interactive communications among the participants more difficult, which renders the coordination and supervision of the entire business procedure more challenging.
In order to solve such problems, many attempts to automate business procedure have been made. However, all such attempts have failed to satisfy the ever-changing business demand, because they may not easily adapt to the general business environments.